In the frenzy to point fingers (and guns) - while New York is receiving more volunteers than they can use (and are reluctantly turning them away); while flags fly from homes that never owned one before Wednesday; while 18-year-old males are miraculously finding their way to the post office to register for the draft (the WHAT?), or to the recruiting offices... while the uniformed emergency services dig through The Pile at Ground Zero for their fallen comrades and the untold civilian dead (ever mindful that any one of the human fragments they find may have once been part of a perpetrator)...

I was asleep until after it all had, lliterally, gone down, and I've been playing catch-up ever since, so perhaps my reaction doesn't match any of yours - but I wonder. Plus or minus a couple of hours, it's been five days since the universe changed, and I am still somewhat less than articulate on the topic; I begin to suspect that I may always be, which may be taken as an apology for the rambling to follow.

Lacking a television, I have relied as I always do on NPR's coverage; although I have seen (at a neighbor's house, the same day) most of the critical footage, my memories of the events and the aftermath are primarily audio. There is an obvious detachment in the comprehension of information gathered that way, so that to my perspective these things are more unreal than surreal. I have found myself detached in other ways, too - mute, shaken, listless, inattentive to self, avoiding others, unwilling to leave my apartment - were it not for my jobs, I may have neither showered nor dressed, let alone gone out, since awakening shortly before noon Tuesday.

In a word: depressed.

But not quite depressed enough to become immune, nor to completely avoid contemplating the thousands of individual human lives cut short, and the thousands more - the survivors' - horribly transformed. Am I alone in putting myself in the place of the people on those airplanes, or the people they called on their cell phones, or the people in Trade Center elevators who could never have learned what had happened, or the ones on the floors above the crash sites who knew all too well? Sometime yesterday or the day before, NPR began reading names from the lists of the dead. Suddenly, those people became real.

I wonder 'out loud' here in this forum if the (so far) aimless sabre rattling and empty threatening rhetoric, the righteous indignation and the reflex jingoism, isn't anything more than this country's unconscious collective attempt to avoid thinking about the real tragedy of 9/11/01: not the insult to America's sovereignty; not the halting of business as usual; not the billions of dollars lost in property, trade and airline fares; not even the spectacle of two 110-story buildings collapsing, but the personal, intimate deaths of thousands.

This nation is forever changed. We will, as Franklin warned us more than 225 years ago, willingly trade liberty for security. In our rush to prove that this is still the Home of the Brave, we will make it less the Land of the Free. Someday I may be able to think clearly about how I feel about that, other than to (perhaps mistakenly) fear it more than I fear an act of terrorism claiming someone I know and love. For now, I willingly acknowledge what so few public voices have done: I am ill with the shock of the human loss, but I will not turn away from it.

Oseh shalom b'imromav, hu yaseh shalom aleinu...

E'telekeli